Los Angeles’s mayoral election

A Pacific plod

This is not the way to get Angelenos interested in politics

THE only contest Los Angeles cared about this week shut off part of Hollywood Boulevard for nine days and featured an off-colour song about actresses’ breasts. With the Oscars out of the way, the candidates for mayor hope that voters in America’s second city may finally start paying them some attention in the run-up to the election primary, on March 5th.

They should be so lucky. Turnout rarely exceeds one-third. This is not wholly surprising. The Progressives who drew up the city charter in 1925 created a weak mayor (and a strong council). The mayor’s powers slightly increased in 1999, but unlike in Chicago and New York, the office still has little control over schools and health care. Moreover, the city’s unwieldy sprawl, with a mountain range running through it and independent fiefs like Beverly Hills carved out within it, hardly fosters civic unity.

Still, the men and women competing to replace the termed-out Antonio Villaraigosa cannot be accused of excessive zeal. The campaign dulled early on. Debates were too numerous (there will have been 42 by the time of the primary), and descended into sloganeering. No candidate has set forth any sort of vision for the city. Even their fights have been half-hearted.

Worries over Los Angeles’s fiscal health loom over the race. Like many others, the city has struggled to find an answer to the long-term problem of spending growing faster than income, caused largely by pension and health-care costs. The city’s administrative officer, Miguel Santana, forecasts a cumulative deficit of $1.4 billion over the next four years (see chart). No candidate has come close to explaining how that gap might be plugged.

That may be because they shoulder some of the blame for creating it. Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jan Perry, the three leading candidates, were all members of the council that in 2007 agreed to a 25% pay rise for most city workers over the next five years. The crash that followed led to thousands of lay-offs and cutbacks. Yet total salary expenditures have not fallen.

The new mayor will preside over talks on a new city-workers’ contract in 2014. Mr Santana’s projected deficits do not include any new costs that may emerge from that discussion (nor any shortfalls that the city will have to meet should its pension funds not meet their assumed, and optimistic, 7.75% annual return). Unions have showered support on Mr Garcetti and, particularly, Ms Greuel; critics charge that they will expect a return on that investment.

Kevin James, a Republican outsider and former talk-radio host who campaigns in the tub-thumping manner of his old job, likes to say that his opponents’ antics have brought the city near to insolvency. Others, like Austin Beutner, a businessman and former deputy mayor, fear not bankruptcy so much as “death by a thousand cuts”, with services slowly starved by deficits, waste and weak growth. Crime is down, as in other cities, but signs of neglect are everywhere, from potholed roads to shuttered parks.

Of the three leading candidates, Ms Perry, an African-American convert to Judaism who has served on the council since 2001, has perhaps the most credible claim to fiscal rigour. (She also most resembles a human being during the debates.) But of the front-runners she has the slimmest chance of reaching the run-off, on May 21st.

Polls suggest that contest will pit Mr Garcetti, a Mexican-Jewish-Italian-American Hollywood councilman, against Ms Greuel, a lily-white resident of the relatively conservative San Fernando Valley. He served as council president for six years; since 2009 she has been the city controller, an independent fiscal watchdog. Ideologically little seems to separate the pair. They spent seven years on the council together, regularly voting the same way. Both oppose a proposed sales-tax rise; both want to scrap the city’s business tax; neither has a specific plan to replace the lost revenues.

In debates the marble-smooth Mr Garcetti bests Ms Greuel, whose bland patter is so repetitive that her rivals have taken to running a book on how often pet phrases crop up. Yet she has secured a broader range of endorsements and her backers have deeper pockets. Neither candidate has a lock on the crucial Latino vote.

Much may change after the primary. Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist, says races are often won in the first week of the run-off campaign. The candidates might even begin talking about neglected issues like jobs and school reform. Just don’t expect the locals to start caring.